It seems President Bush is about to blink on an auto-industry bailout.

“Given the current weakened state of the US economy,” Bush spokeswoman Dana Perino said yesterday, “we will consider other options if necessary, including the use of the TARP program to prevent a collapse of troubled automakers.”

Instead, he insisted that Congress shift money already set aside for Detroit for other purposes.

Even that was bad enough: Taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to take a risk on grossly mismanaged corporations when no one in the private sector will.

But at least Congress wouldn’t be committing new funds. And it would be insisting on bringing Big Three labor costs more in line with the competition.

Alas, the United Auto Workers seems to have outsmarted Bush. It refused to promise any serious concessions, apparently assuming the White House would never let auto makers fail. Period.

And the union seems to be right.

But for Bush to skim TARP funds would be an outrage.

* It would directly flout Congress: The Detroit bailout lost in the Senate on Thursday because it didn’t require UAW givebacks.

* He’d be going back on his own vow not to tap into TARP funds.

* He’d be sending a dangerous message to the union – and company management – that they’ll never have to pay a price for profligacy, that as long as they remain “too big to fail,” with credible threats of impending bankruptcy and massive layoffs, they’re welcome to hit up taxpayers as often as they like.

(President-elect Barack Obama ought to be petrified of that – since he’ll soon be the one guarding the federal vault. Obama should be shouting the loudest against such a deal; that he’s not may soon come back to haunt him.)

* In an effort to avoid job losses and cascading economic damage, taxpayers will be propping up fundamentally overpriced and unaffordable jobs.

And (optimistically) at a cost of $100 billion by the time the bleeding stops, estimates Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com.

Bush should rediscover the resolve for which he is famous – and just say “No.”